The Simple Art of Murder

by Raymond Chandler

  Masters said gruffly: “Hell, man, you’re just cracking wise. You couldn’t know all those things.”

  He looked back at Drew. Drew was gray-faced, taut. Aage came a little farther away from the wall and stood close to Drew. The blonde girl didn’t move a muscle.

  Delaguerra said wearily: “Sure, I’m guessing, but I’m guessing to fit the facts. It had to be like that. Marr was no slouch with a gun and he was on edge, all set. Why didn’t he get a shot in? Because it was a woman that called on him.”

  He lifted an arm, pointed at the blonde. “There’s your killer. She loved Imlay even though she framed him. She’s a junkie and junkies are like that. She got sad and sorry and she went after Marr herself. Ask her!”

  The blonde stood up in a smooth lunge. Her right hand jerked up from the cushions with a small automatic in it, the one she had shot Delaguerra with. Her green eyes were pale and empty and staring. Masters whirled around, flailed at her arm with the shiny revolver.

  She shot him twice, point-blank, without a flicker of hesitation. Blood spurted from the side of his thick neck, down the front of his coat. He staggered, dropped the shiny revolver, almost at Delaguerra’s feet. He fell outwards towards the wall behind Delaguerra’s chair, one arm groping out for the wall. His hand hit the wall and trailed down it as he fell. He crashed heavily, didn’t move again.

  Delaguerra had the shiny revolver almost in his hand.

  Drew was on his feet yelling. The girl turned slowly towards Aage, seemed to ignore Delaguerra. Aage jerked a Luger from under his arm and knocked Drew out of the way with his arm. The small automatic and the Luger roared at the same time. The small gun missed. The girl was flung down on the davenport, her left hand clutching at her breast. She rolled her eyes, tried to lift the gun again. Then she fell sidewise on the cushions and her left hand went lax, dropped away from her breast. The front of her dress was a sudden welter of blood. Her eyes opened and shut, opened and stayed open.

  Aage swung the Luger towards Delaguerra. His eyebrows were twisted up into a sharp grin of intense strain. His smoothly combed, sand-colored hair flowed down his bony scalp as tightly as though it were painted on it.

  Delaguerra shot him four times, so rapidly that the explosions were like the rattle of a machine gun.

  In the instant of time before he fell Aage’s face became the thin, empty face of an old man, his eyes the vacant eyes of an idiot. Then his long body jackknifed to the floor, the Luger still in his hand. One leg doubled under him as if there was no bone in it.

  Powder smell was sharp in the air. The air was stunned by the sound of guns. Delaguerra got to his feet slowly, motioned to Drew with the shiny revolver.

  “Your party, Commissioner. Is this anything like what you wanted?”

  Drew nodded slowly, white-faced, quivering. He swallowed, moved slowly across the floor, past Aage’s sprawled body. He looked down at the girl on the davenport, shook his head. He went over to Masters, went down on one knee, touched him. He stood up again.

  “All dead, I think,” he muttered.

  Delaguerra said: “That’s swell. What happened to the big boy? The bruiser?”

  “They sent him away. I—I don’t think they meant to kill you, Delaguerra.”

  Delaguerra nodded a little. His face began to soften, the rigid lines began to go out of it. The side that was not a bloodstained mask began to look human again. He sopped at his face with a handkerchief. It came away bright red with blood. He threw it away and lightly fingered his matted hair into place. Some of it was caught in the dried blood.

  “The hell they didn’t,” he said.

  The house was very still. There was no noise outside. Drew listened, sniffed, went to the front door and looked out. The street outside was dark, silent. He came back close to Delaguerra. Very slowly a smile worked itself on to his face.

  “It’s a hell of a note,” he said, “when a commissioner of police has to be his own undercover man—and a square cop had to be framed off the force to help him.”

  Delaguerra looked at him without expression. “You want to play it that way?”

  Drew spoke calmly now. The pink was back in his face. “For the good of the department, man, and the city—and ourselves, it’s the only way to play it.”

  Delaguerra looked him straight in the eyes.

  “I like it that way too,” he said in a dead voice. “If it gets played—exactly that way.”

  THIRTEEN

  Marcus braked the car to a stop and grinned admiringly at the big tree-shaded house.

  “Pretty nice,” he said. “I could go for a long rest there myself.”

  Delaguerra got out of the car slowly, as if he was stiff and very tired. He was hatless, carried his straw under his arm. Part of the left side of his head was shaved and the shaved part covered by a thick pad of gauze and tape, over the stitches. A wick of wiry black hair stuck up over one edge of the bandage, with a ludicrous effect.

  He said: “Yeah—but I’m not staying here, sap. Wait for me.”

  He went along the path of stones that wound through the grass. Trees speared long shadows across the lawn, through the morning sunlight. The house was very still, with drawn blinds, a dark wreath on the brass knocker. Delaguerra didn’t go up to the door. He turned off along another path under the windows and went along the side of the house past the gladioli beds.

  There were more trees at the back, more lawn, more flowers, more sun and shadow. There was a pond with water lilies in it and a big stone bullfrog. Beyond was a half-circle of lawn chairs around an iron table with a tile top. In one of the chairs Belle Marr sat.

  She wore a black-and-white dress, loose and casual, and there was a wide-brimmed garden hat on her chestnut hair. She sat very still, looking into the distance across the lawn. Her face was white. The make-up glared on it.

  She turned her head slowly, smiled a dull smile, motioned to a chair beside her. Delaguerra didn’t sit down. He took his straw from under his arm, snapped a finger at the brim, said: “The case is closed. There’ll be inquests, investigations, threats, a lot of people shouting their mouths off to horn in on the publicity, that sort of thing. The papers will play it big for a while. But underneath, on the record, it’s closed. You can begin to try to forget it.”

  The girl looked at him suddenly, widened her vivid blue eyes, looked away again, over the grass.

  “Is your head very bad, Sam?” she asked softly.

  Delaguerra said: “No. It’s fine . . . What I mean is the La Motte girl shot Masters—and she shot Donny. Aage shot her. I shot Aage. All dead, ring around the rosy. Just how Imlay got killed we’ll not know ever, I guess. I can’t see that it matters now.”

  Without looking up at him Belle Marr said quietly: “But how did you know it was Imlay up at the cabin? The paper said—” She broke off, shuddered suddenly.

  He stared woodenly at the hat he was holding. “I didn’t. I thought a woman shot Donny. It looked like a good hunch that was Imlay up at the lake. It fitted his description.”

  “How did you know it was a woman . . . that killed Donny?” Her voice had a lingering, half-whispered stillness.

  “I just knew.”

  He walked away a few steps, stood looking at the trees. He turned slowly, came back, stood beside her chair again. His face was very weary.

  “We had great times together—the three of us. You and Donny and I. Life seems to do nasty things to people. It’s all gone now—all the good part.”

  Her voice was still a whisper saying: “Maybe not all gone, Sam. We must see a lot of each other, from now on.”

  A vague smile moved the corners of his lips, went away again. “It’s my first frame-up,” he said quietly. “I hope it will be my last.”

  Belle Marr’s head jerked a little. Her hands took hold of the arms of the chair, looked white against the varnished wood. Her whole body seemed to get rigid.

  After a moment Delaguerra reached in his pocket and something gold glittered in his hand. He
looked down at it dully.

  “Got the badge back,” he said. “It’s not quite as clean as it was. Clean as most, I suppose. I’ll try to keep it that way.” He put it back in his pocket.

  Very slowly the girl stood up in front of him. She lifted her chin, stared at him with a long level stare. Her face was a mask of white plaster behind the rouge.

  She said: “My God, Sam—I begin to understand.”

  Delaguerra didn’t look at her face. He looked past her shoulder at some vague spot in the distance. He spoke vaguely, distantly.

  “Sure . . . I thought it was a woman because it was a small gun such as a woman would use. But not only on that account. After I went up to the cabin I knew Donny was primed for trouble and it wouldn’t be that easy for a man to get the drop on him. But it was a perfect set-up for Imlay to have done it. Masters and Aage assumed he’d done it and had a lawyer phone in admitting he did it and promising to surrender him in the morning. So it was natural for anyone who didn’t know Imlay was dead to fall in line. Besides, no cop would expect a woman to pick up her shells.

  “After I got Joey Chill’s story I thought it might be the La Motte girl. But I didn’t think so when I said it in front of her. That was dirty. It got her killed, in a way. Though I wouldn’t give much for her chances anyway, with that bunch.”

  Belle Marr was still staring at him. The breeze blew a wisp of her hair and that was the only thing about her that moved.

  He brought his eyes back from the distance, looked at her gravely for a brief moment, looked away again. He took a small bunch of keys out of his pocket, tossed them down on the table.

  “Three things were tough to figure until I got completely wise. The writing on the pad, the gun in Donny’s hand, the missing shells. Then I tumbled to it. He didn’t die right away. He had guts and he used them to the last flicker—to protect somebody. The writing on the pad was a bit shaky. He wrote it afterwards, when he was alone, dying. He had been thinking of Imlay and writing the name helped mess the trail. Then he got the gun out of his desk to die with it in his hand. That left the shells. I got that too, after a while.

  “The shots were fired close, across the desk, and there were books on one end of the desk. The shells fell there, stayed on the desk where he could get them. He couldn’t have got them off the floor. There’s a key to the office on your ring. I went there last night, late. I found the shells in a humidor with his cigars. Nobody looked for them there. You only find what you expect to find, after all.”

  He stopped talking and rubbed the side of his face. After a moment he added: “Donny did the best he could—and then he died. It was a swell job—and I’m letting him get away with it.”

  Belle Marr opened her mouth slowly. A kind of babble came out of it first, then words, clear words.

  “It wasn’t just women, Sam. It was the kind of women he had.” She shivered. “I’ll go downtown now and give myself up.”

  Delaguerra said: “No. I told you I was letting him get away with it. Downtown they like it the way it is. It’s swell politics. It gets the city out from under the Masters-Aage mob. It puts Drew on top for a little while, but he’s too weak to last. So that doesn’t matter . . . You’re not going to do anything about any of it. You’re going to do what Donny used his last strength to show he wanted. You’re staying out. Goodbye.”

  He looked at her white shattered face once more, very quickly. Then he swung around, walked away over the lawn, past the pool with the lily pads and the stone bullfrog along the side of the house and out to the car.

  Pete Marcus swung the door open. Delaguerra got in and sat down and put his head far back against the seat, slumped down in the car and closed his eyes. He said flatly: “Take it easy, Pete. My head hurts like hell.”

  Marcus started the car and turned into the street, drove slowly back along De Neve Lane towards town. The tree-shaded house disappeared behind them. The tall trees finally hid it.

  When they were a long way from it Delaguerra opened his eyes again.

  * * *

  I’LL BE WAITING

  * * *

  At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.

  Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.

  The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, molded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.

  The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing perfectly perceived, an error of vision. . . .

  He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.

  She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pajamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.

  “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.

  The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.

  She said nothing.

  Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.

  “Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.

  Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

  “Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

  “Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

  “I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”

  “I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.

  “Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

  “It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”

  She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?”

  Tony smiled his toy smile. “Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”

  She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”

  “There was a girl
here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?”

  The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”

  He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. “Unh-uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”

  The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Tony Reseck.”

  “Sounds like a hunky.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Polish.”

  “Go on, Tony.”

  “All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”

  “You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.

  He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”

  “Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place—without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”